


Safety Procedures

by mimsical



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blood, Crushes, Hellmurder Island, Injury, Jake doesn't have a crush nope no siree, M/M, Pre-Relationship, bisexual awakening, robotic shenanigans, the power of broship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 01:37:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11325969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimsical/pseuds/mimsical
Summary: Jake unintentionally discovers the brobot's first aid programming.





	Safety Procedures

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lasciviousWildheart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lasciviousWildheart/gifts).



> just a silly thing i wrote for taz/optimisticduelist about jake with an injury and a terrible crush he isn't ready to acknowledge.
> 
> jake's 13, 14 at the most here.

A silhouette disturbs the line of sunlight cast over the top edge of the ruins of your childhood home and you groan, pulling your hands away from your blood-sticky sock. “Go away!” you say, twisting around. Suspicions confirmed: it’s the brobot, perched on the wall, presumable staring down at you. “Look, you inopportunist, I’m a bit preoccupied at the moment, so if you could be a real gent and just shuffle along and give me my requisite ass-kicking some other day, that would be fantastic.”

It doesn’t move. You hope that means your foreseeable future will be strife-free and bite you lip, turning back to your leg. You’ve given yourself a nasty cut, jagged up the side of your calf, oozing blood down to your ankle. It’s just bad luck, really. It’s what you get for getting distracted. You peel off the rest of your sock gingerly and stuff it into your shoe for safe-keeping. It’d be best to try and wash some of the dirt out of the cut but it makes you antsy to be out here too long. You swear up and down some of the dadblasted monsters can sense injury a mile off. Maybe if you’re quick about it…

You decaptchalogue one of your spare water bottles, a hand towel, and some bandages. It’s high noon, or thereabouts. Not quite the hottest part of the day but it’s humid and the sun’s scorching everything not in the shade. Even with your back to the remnants of a wall, partly in shade, you can feel how hot the stone is. You wipe sweat off your forehead and try to decide what’s the best angle to try and pour the water down your leg from. Holy fucking mackerel if this cut doesn’t sting like a whole contingent of tiny devils with lemon juice for fingers poking a paper cut.

A shadow falls over you, and then there’s a quiet scuffling of feet across stone.

“No,” you say, squeezing your eyes shut and putting a hand over your face. “No, I cannot fucking deal with this, you—you fluff-brained—sakes alive, does it look like I’m in any condition to—”

The water bottle is tugged free from your admittedly loose grip. When you cautiously take a peek out from around your hand you find your robotic compatriot has joined you on the ground. It has kneeled down and is inspecting your wound. After a moment it retrieves the hand towel from where you’d draped it across your other leg to keep it clean-ish and pours some of the water on it.

“Oh,” you say. “Strider gave you some first-aid programming or something? I guess that makes sense. It’s not like he’s trying to get me to keel over dead in the middle of the—ow. Ow, ow, ow.”

The brobot ignores you, one hand holding your knee still and the other calmly dabbing at the cut. It’s kind of really weird, actually. You’ve not been close to it in non-combative circumstances since… well, since you were still building it under Dirk’s careful instruction. You wonder for maybe the trillionth time if this is really what Dirk looks like. If it were you building a metal and wiring version of yourself you feel like you’d spruce yourself up a bit. Make yourself taller. Fix your teeth. Something. You mean, you know objectively that your robot is a close approximation of Dirk Strider, with the hair and ridiculous glasses and all. You’ve seen photos of your friend. But… if it were Dirk here, helping you clean up after you sliced yourself to ribbons, is this what he would look like? Would he be as focused? The brobot is silent out of necessity, not having been deemed worthy of a mouth. Would Dirk be quiet, or would he start up on one of his mind-bending rambles with about eighty flavors of incomprehensible metaphors to distract you?

The robot seems to decide your leg is as clean as it’s going to get without running water and disinfectant and discards the towel. You take the opportunity to scrub your eyes and sniff yourself back into respectability.

On the plus side, no mouth means you can be a baby about a little pain without getting any smart remarks about it.

Brobot takes ahold of your leg again and starts winding the gauze around your calf. This stings significantly less, and you relax a little. In the privacy of your own brain you can admit it’s sort of nice, to be touched by something that isn’t (currently, anyway) trying to hurt you. Your grandma always took care of any bangs or bruises you collected as a small child, and when she passed… you figured out how to do it on your own. You learned how to do a lot of things on your own. Soothe yourself during storms, fix the lights if they go out without warning, eat three meals a day.

Great, you’re doing a bangup job at being excessively sentimental. You refocus on the brobot. You think this is an ordinary thing for two comrades-in-arms to do for each other. Hell, if Dirk scraped himself up somehow and you were around you know you’d have no problem helping him patch himself up. It might even qualify under the Striderean terms of broship. After all, what sort of gent wouldn’t be in his best friend’s corner? Just like the brobot is doing now.

Your stomach feels weird. Maybe it’s the blood, though you’ve never been squeamish about it before? You’ve forgotten what it feels like to be touched by another human. This doesn’t count, even if the power cells that animate your companion heat the metal of its hands to a familiar temperature. Well, it’s like you said. There’s nothing strange about wishing it was your good bro’s hands doing the dirty work of wrapping up your leg instead of his metal imposter self.

The brobot neatly tucks the gauze under itself so it’ll stay in place on your hike back to your globe. It stays kneeling in front of you for a moment, hand on your knee, now staring at you rather than your leg. Your face feels awfully hot. Too long in the sun, surely. Maybe you’re getting a sunburn. You should probably rehydrate. The brobot rubs your knee with its thumb soothingly, like it’s offering its condolences on your injury. You bite down an inexplicable desire to snicker nervously. Man it really is hot out here. 

“Okay, that’s… enough of that,” you say, and push its hand away. “It’s barely more than a scratch. Just a flesh wound.” You clear your throat and captchalogue your things, and then set about pulling your sock back on and retying your shoe. The brobot just sits there, maddeningly implacable. You avoid looking at it, and firmly don’t think about why you don’t want to look at it. When you go to stand, it moves suddenly and offers you a hand up. You take it, gingerly. Your leg takes weight fine, though it’s certainly not comfortable by any stretch of imagination.

“Well,” you say. “Thanks a million. You sure are adept at wilderness first aid. I’ll be sure to pass along my compliments to your creator, eh?”

It says nothing, of course.

“Right.” You eye the slope down, back into the jungle. “Well, I’ll catch you later, then.”

You successfully do not tumble onto your face at any point, and pick your way down the rubble and rocks and dirt under the hot sunlight until the trees swallow you up. About a hundred or so paces in, the back of your neck prickles. When you turn, ready to reach for your pistols, you find only the brobot, watching.

“I said thanks,” you say. “You can scram now. Go back to… whatever it is you do when I’m not around to hassle. Wrestle some indigenous butlers. Hunt for giant spiders.”

It only stares at you.

“Well, fine!” You turn your back on it, pointedly, and continue your return journey. Through sheer determination you don’t check to see if it’s still there for a solid ten minutes. When you finally look, unable to resist the lure anymore, indeed do you find a Strider-shaped robot tailing you.

Safety procedures, you tell yourself. You’re vulnerable to attack right now, so it only makes sense that it follow you. Just another part of first aid. Irritating, sure. Dirk’s tendency to go so far overboard he swims out to the other side of the world strikes again. But it’s nothing invasive. Easily ignored. It’s probably more polite just to let the robot do its thing and then be on its way once you’re safe at home again. You’d be fine without it, too, but it’s not doing any harm.

And if you’re the tiniest bit relieved to have someone watching your back, if it’s nice to not be peeling your eyes clean out of your head to scan for predators when you’re already distracted by being in pain, well. Nobody needs to know. Least of all Dirk. He doesn’t have anyone watching out for him, does he? He handles it on his own.

No, when you get back you’ll tell him about your hopes for a cool new scar and complain about his robot’s interfering tendencies, and you’ll both get a laugh out of it, and everything will be fine.

**Author's Note:**

> ...and somewhere out there in the future dirk strider leaned back in his chair with a sigh of relief that he'd successfully found a way to help jake survive hellmurder island.


End file.
